Diehard admirers will probably love the homespun stickiness and background secrets revealed; others should pass.
Number eight in Chiaverini’s Elm Creek Quilt series delivers predictable yuletide cheer and saccharine sentiments.
Awkwardly inserted into the series’ time frame, this slim holiday offering takes place a year and a half after The Quilter’s Apprentice (1999) began with widowed Sylvia Bergstrom Compson’s reluctant return to the family home she abandoned a half-century earlier, in the middle of her successful partnership with Sarah McClure in a quilting school, but before Sylvia’s marriage to dapper old Andrew in The Master Quilter (2004). It’s Sylvia’s first Christmas at Elm Creek Manor in 50 years. Sarah and husband Matt, who tends the property’s orchards, are staying with her rather than visiting Sarah’s estranged mother. Nursing her own regrets about family quarrels, Sylvia urges Sarah to reconcile with her mother, but she refuses and heads off to the attic. Long-stowed decorations and an unfinished Christmas quilt bring back Sylvia’s suppressed memories of perfect Bergstrom Christmases past. Flashbacks move from scenes of her girlhood to the final, tragic Christmas she spent at the manor as a young woman. She learns from her dying mother how to make the famous Bergstrom apple strudel, discovers what true charity is during the Great Depression, competes fiercely with older sister Claudia, pieces together the Christmas quilt, chops down a Christmas tree with new husband James and waits for James and her brother Richard to return from WWII. (Those who have read the earlier novels know that they never do.) Intended to evoke the charms of Simpler Times, the novel is a sappy concoction of conventional wisdom and lessons learned. Previous Elm Creek Quilt installments offered solid, diverse characters and plots relevant to contemporary readers; this slapdash effort seems more a holiday project conceived for fans than a story needing to be told.
Diehard admirers will probably love the homespun stickiness and background secrets revealed; others should pass.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-8657-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2005
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
This first novel, ostensibly about the friendship between two boys, Reuven and Danny, from the time when they are fourteen on opposing yeshiva ball clubs, is actually a gently didactic differentiation between two aspects of the Jewish faith, the Hasidic and the Orthodox. Primarily the Hasidic, the little known mystics with their beards, earlocks and stringently reclusive way of life. According to Reuven's father who is a Zionist, an activist, they are fanatics; according to Danny's, other Jews are apostates and Zionists "goyim." The schisms here are reflected through discussions, between fathers and sons, and through the separation imposed on the two boys for two years which still does not affect their lasting friendship or enduring hopes: Danny goes on to become a psychiatrist refusing his inherited position of "tzaddik"; Reuven a rabbi.... The explanation, in fact exegesis, of Jewish culture and learning, of the special dedication of the Hasidic with its emphasis on mind and soul, is done in sufficiently facile form to engage one's interest and sentiment. The publishers however see a much wider audience for The Chosen. If they "rub their tzitzis for good luck,"—perhaps—although we doubt it.
Pub Date: April 28, 1967
ISBN: 0449911543
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1967
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